Working Women and Conservative Feminism

On February 13th, 2017 President Donald Trump met with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, to discuss trade and the challenges working women face. Ivanka Trump, the President’s eldest daughter, was among the female entrepreneurs present at the meeting. She serves on the Board of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, an organization that supports women in finance, as well as on the #WomenWhoWork campaign, which she founded in 2014 in the hopes of bringing recognition to the ‘modern woman’ (i.e.: a working woman who leads what Ivanka calls a ‘multidimensional’ life). She is a champion for gender equality and women’s rights, but since she is a member of the Trump family, liberals abhor her — and are currently boycotting the products in her clothing line, which Nordstrom recently dropped, so as to send some sort of message to her and her father.

I can’t fathom how liberal feminists don’t realize how counter intuitive their actions are — for in choosing not to purchase Ivanka’s goods because of their opinions on her father, they’re creating an environment in which the actions of some man influence a woman’s chances of success! What happened to obliterating the patriarchy? Do liberals not understand that, by boycotting Ivanka’s clothing line so as to send a message to her father, all they are doing is propagating the notion that women are people’s sisters, mothers, daughters, etc., rather than people themselves?

According to Andrew Soergel of U.S. News, Trump and Trudeau “participated in a roundtable discussion focused on opening up more opportunities for the advancement of female business leaders”. What? We cannot assume that men and women have equal opportunities already because if we did, what our President and Canada’s Prime Minister want to do is promote misandry rather than gender equality; so we must assume that there exists some level of inequality in regards to the challenges facing potential entrepreneurs. We should, therefore, ask ourselves what the differences in these challenges are. The laws governing the creation and management of business apply to everyone, regardless of their gender, so the logical conclusion is that the differences are social.

Do women not have the opportunities to get degrees in business, economics, or finance? It is unlikely that this is the case, considering about forty percent (give or take) of people on track to receive an MBA are female. Are women turned off by the [supposed] wage gap? It’s also unlikely that this is the case because a rational woman would forgo a lucrative career in business for a career in, say, anthropology, just because there is a possibility that a male colleague will make $600,000 per year while she will make, say, $500,000 per year. What is it then? Could the differences be because there are expectations that are imposed on women that are not typically imposed on men — such as the whole ‘#dresslikeawoman’ trend? It’s possible — but why is this off-putting to women? It is neither offensive nor oppressive to ask a woman to wear a dress, skirt, or pair of pants instead of a romper or pair of leggings, and to remonstrate the concept of ‘dressing like a woman’ is to degrade the look and idea of femininity. Do liberal feminists really not see that?

Conservatives are often labeled by contemporary feminists as anti-women or sexist, but we are neither anti-women nor sexist. We believe in gender equality, unlike these new-wave feminists who, more often than not, are more similar to misandrists than to their alleged idols, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Women who have long hair, wear skirts, are stay-at-home mothers, and enjoy classically feminine pursuits like cooking and sewing are shamed in our society because contemporary feminists have created an environment in which it is wrong to be stereotypically feminine.

I, as a conservative woman, believe that there is a distinct difference between feminists and ‘feminazis’, and the narrative that liberal women propagate is one of feminazism. You cannot denounce women who are the quintessence of classic femininity and still call yourself a feminist because then there is no difference between you and a misogynist.

When it comes to ‘obliterating the patriarchy’ and ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, there is, for women, but one means to those ends: believing in ourselves enough to stifle our concerns that we will not be taken seriously because of the pitch of our voice or that we will be rejected because of our gender. We are women, and we were tasked with both creating civilization and keeping it alive. We have to strive for success despite our own trepidations because if we can nurture generation after generation, we can be better than anyone who would dare reject us could ever dream of being.

If, ladies, you want to call yourself a feminist, just remember one thing: that the true feminist can conquer the world in both combat boots and heels.